Developing relationships within the community – readers, writers, publicists, editors. Chutzpah pays off. My experience so far has been overwhelmingly good. I love it when I tweet or comment and make someone’s day – or I get hold of a book I really wanted.

Improving your understanding of the book market. I’ve much more idea of age-ranges, the style of different imprints and the likely readership than I had before.

Matching the right book with the right reader. I cannot emphasise this enough. A reviewer’s purpose is to unite the people who like that-sort-of-thing with their preferred reading material. It’s not for me to judge – the thing’s been written. I know what love and care goes into the vast majority of writing for young people that I read – what earthly good could come of me slagging it off?

Investigating good and sometimes great writing. How does it work? What can I steal? [ Please don’t take that too literally] Even with works that really aren’t my thing, I have learned a lot by thinking about why.

Inspiring me to write. We’re all ‘just adding pebbles to the cairn’ as Maeve Binchy put it so beautifully. Not rivals – fellow creators.

Receiving books for free – how wonderful is that? If I can bear to, I pass appropriate ones to my local library – doubly pleasing.

Occasionally getting books well before they come out. I feel so honoured when that happens. Hint hint publishers!

Read entries in historical directories for your town. Two Yeast Importers and three Tripe Dressers in Scarborough 1890 – who knew?

Read the handwritten ads on the shoe-shop window. Enjoy the rAnDom capital’s and folk punctuation.

Read pulp fiction and poetry, textbooks and travel writing. Steal unashamedly. Not just fragments of people, and glimpses of places but turns of phrase. And with novels – nick dirty great chunks of plot. If JMW Turner chose to copy Claude and many others to learn – why shouldn’t you?

Read magazines about interests that aren’t yours.

Read vintage catalogues and recipe books, Shell Guides, Enquire Within and tatty old National Geographics.

Of course, I reserve the right to alter, update and generally mess around with my own list. Inevitably, I found dreadful omissions – and I have reconsidered putting other forms of writing in. Surely they deserve their own list?

The most interesting thing for me was seeing the connections and clusters of influences on my own writing – sparkling like dewdrops on a cobweb. None of that will make sense to you, Dear Reader, if I do not spell out what I see as the highlights. A heap of books is quite interesting in itself – but how much more so if someone enthuses with joy and detail.

So here goes.

The first book leads me to a facet I admire in other writers – but haven’t even attempted – humour. Douglas Adams’ Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy had such unexpected comedy – it was a new and startling thing. Could you do that in Science Fiction? It appeared you could. The vigour of it all is something I aspire to – and the joyous use of words. Such characters ! Who can forget Slartibartfast and the coast of Norway, Marvin the Paranoid Android – or Vogon Poetry?

In this batch, I’m going to include the anarchic and bitter Catch-22 by Joseph Heller , Henry Tumour by Anthony McGowan, and The Radleys by Matt Haig. They all deal with dark and important things – without being po-faced. Any book that can make me laugh and cry has to be good.

Some where close by, I’d have to stack Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons – replete with Starkadders, sukebind, and Graceless, Aimless, Feckless, and Pointless the cows. There’d have to be The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster – with the Jules Fieffer illustrations too. I love the ridiculous puns and have a very soft spot for the likes of Tock the Watch-dog Faintly Macabre, the not-so Wicked Which and The Mathemagician – and there’s a proper story .

Richard Adams’ Watership Down comes next. I had to have this for three main reasons: it’s a saga, there’s a deep sense of landscape and there are animals that aren’t twee. I shall focus on the latter.

I am not a vegetarian – but I have thought hard about it. Generally, I don’t eat meat that I don’t know the provenance of – I buy organic or free range or do without. Part of this is down to such reading. Almost anything by Dick King-Smith delights me – but The Sheep-Pig just tops the list. I foolishly omitted Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty [guaranteed to make me weep buckets ] and Lloyd Alexander’s Book of Three where we meet Hen Wen the Oracular Pig for the first time from my original list. Mea culpa.

Good animal writing is tricky to pull off – but I’d have to say I still get great pleasure from Rudyard Kipling’s Just-So Stories [not to mention the wonderful, unpatronising language]. The valiant Reepicheep made ‘The Voyage of the Dawn Treader’ just reach the top of my C.S.Lewis pile. [It has to have the original Pauline Baynes illustrations, of course.]

Third on the alphabetical list came Joan Aiken and I picked The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. Two things I particularly cherish in it – alternate history (I read it late and had not known that you could do such a thing) and Winter. The use of a different ‘trouser leg of time’ [T. Pratchett, The Night Watch] leads to such wonders as much of Sir Terry’s work, and the haunting if flawed Jonathan Strange & Mr Norell by Susanna Clarke.

Ah but Winter! How that speaks to my Yorkshire soul. Three books I left out feature glorious evocations of snow: Dark Matter by Michelle Paver, Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow by Peter Høeg and Vendela Vida’s Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name. All of these took me to crisply shown worlds and looked at them through strange and unsettling angles.

I’d have to have Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights as part of this Venn diagram – Serafina Pekkala, Iorek Byrnison, and Svalbard all inhabit my Winter imagination. So indeed does the White Witch but I can’t have another Narnia – but I will garner both The Box of Delights by John Masefield and The Children of Green Knowe into this corner. Both of these very different yet imaginative works finish a conflict between good and evil on Christmas Eve. I find it hard to think of a much more appropriate time. I’d better include Dicken’s A Christmas Carol – I do love a redemption story and I can be shamelessly sentimental at times.

I can’t believe I left out Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen – how could I forget brave Gerda and the Little Robber Girl? A wonderful Scandinavian adventure – with heroines.

So unsurprisingly, there are a fair few with more than a hint of fantasy or magical realism. There’s poetry and word-play in many, and definitely a sense of place pervading this selection. The sea and ghosts have a tendency to crop up – and heroines.

I am happy to put in links to The Hive ( which supports independent bookshops) for any title if you are interested – just let me know.

On Thursday 31st October 2013 I took myself from West Wittering to Swiss Cottage Library. I didn’t get the prize for furthest travelled – my friend and colleague Julie Pike from Dorset earned that – but I did come away with several small and special treasures.

Firstly the most obvious – signatures from the illustrious guests in copies of their books which I had taken especially. The event was organised by IBBY and focused on using myth, legend and history in writing for children and young people. The four wonderful writers were:

Sally kindly signed my review copy of ‘Tinder’ which I had just finished reading on the train. I shall be writing about it on Serendipity Reviews shortly – but what I can say is that the complete book is most beautifully produced – and was perfect reading for Halloween.

I took ‘Mister Creecher’ for Chris to sign . Those who know me well will know I hold this in high regard – but I am also itching to read ‘The Dead Men Stood Together’. I thoroughly enjoy his thing of taking something from an earlier creepy masterpiece and then genetically engineering a whole new organism out of it.

Susan Cooper made me come all over tongue-tied. Not only is she the author of ‘The Dark is Rising’ sequence, but so cool and laid-back and wise I just wanted to breathe the same air in the hopes that something would transfer to me. After all, she inhabited the same Oxford as Tolkien and Lewis, and I think she knows Alan Garner. Phew.

Last but never, ever the least was Geraldine. I took a little paperback copy of the first book I ever read aloud to a class (Dog Days). Geraldine has written so many smashing books – from Monacello to A Little Lower than than the Angels – that I was spoiled for choice. But I have soft spot for frost fairs and Old London Bridge, and it was a pleasure I shared with the children.

I also took away some less tangible but no less special treasures – in fact I filled the last remaining pages of my Moleskine with them. Here’s a small selection:

Sally Gardner:

children can’t be policed in historical fiction – they can have truly great adventures

imagination allows you to float your mind out of a situation

the pea-soupers she knew as a child around Gray’s Inn were made of ghosts and Charles Dickens

Chris Priestley:

historical fiction allows child characters to be master/mistress of their own destiny

dystopias are historical fiction – just in another direction

he writes for the vestigial 14 year old inside him beguiled by grotesquerie

Susan Cooper:

she is obsessed with place, with the layers of time

uses the past to illuminate the present but ‘God forbid messages’

what a child gets out of a story is not what is put in deliberately to educate – or even to entertain

Geraldine McCaughrean:

history was another place where I had often gone as a child

after a brilliant rant about bowdlerised folk stories – she said the originals were a a place where we can taste the amoral terrifying darkness, the inchoate beings we all nurse inside

research as much as you like – and then around half-way, throw it all away!

I can only agree with the librarian (whose name sadly I did not catch) who thanked the panel for ‘not dumbing down’. It was an exhilarating evening with far more than these brief highlights – much of which is fermenting in my imagination.

Oh, and one final thing – it’s a really good idea to wear something emblematic such as a silver Peter Pan brooch, a skull close to your neck, a gilded vulture or an interlaced symbol of Celtic mysticism. I leave you to guess who wore which…